Home Cooking with Jess – Poblano Pizzas

I really wanted pepperoni on these pizza peppers.  That’s what I envisioned when I started to make the base for the sauce.  

I tasted the finished product as I assembled them, adding the shredded mozzarella. Then I grabbed the banana peppers from the refrigerator … and couldn’t find the pepperoni.  Shout out to my 14-year-old for her choice of a midnight snack the night before. Ha! 

Moving on, I had a lot of veggies in my refrigerator that I needed to use up and I combined a couple of them for this dish. For a few other dishes, I used ground beef or sausage and dice up mushrooms and toss it all together. And that’s what I decided to do with this recipe for the base red sauce of these pizza stuffed peppers.   

If you want to make these vegetarian, you can leave out the meat and just use mushrooms and your pizza sauce.  I go heavy on the cheese for poblanos. 

I have mentioned this in previous columns but making any dish where you are topping it with shredded cheese, I highly recommend that you get a block of cheese and shred it yourself. It’s a tip I learned from a friend on the Connect in the Kitchen Facebook page. Pre-shredded bagged cheese is tossed in cornstarch to prevent the pieces from sticking to each other, but it also affects the amount of melt-ability factor.

Ingredients:

• 3 poblano peppers
• 1 cup of diced mushrooms
• 1 lb of ground beef
• 1/2 an onion 
• 6 oz of shredded mozzarella
• Pasta or pizza sauce
• Pizza toppings of your choice 

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.  Brown meat in skillet until no longer pink.
2. Add onion and stir for 1-2 minutes.  
3. Drain fat and return meat to skillet.  
4. Add mushrooms and sauce and cook for 5 minutes. 
5. Slice poblanos in half width-wise and remove stems and seeds.
6. Place poblano halves on a parchment-lined baking sheet. 
7. Add sauce evenly to each of the 6 halves. 
8. Top with cheese and pizza toppings. 
9. Bake on 400 for 20 minutes. 

Enjoy!